Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 05, 2012 @03:22PM
from the theft-is-intellectual-property dept.

zacharye writes with this snippet from BGR: "Nearly a dozen suspects have been arrested and charged with crimes related to the theft and sale of AMOLED display technology under development at Samsung. Yonhap News Agency on Thursday reported that 11 suspects either currently or formerly employed by Samsung Mobile Display have been arrested. One 46-year-old researcher at Samsung is believed to have accepted a payment of nearly $170,000 from an unnamed 'local rival firm' in exchange for trade secrets pertaining to proprietary Samsung technology used in the company's AMOLED panels..."

Define "well". 170 grand cash, tax free, is like 4 -5 years salary for a PhD level researcher in south korea (who are about 20-30% lower paid than their US counterparts on a nominal, if not PPP basis).

Even by US standards 170 grand is a lot up front. Remember that they're paying someone to steal it, not paying someone to develop it. It could have been a 500 person job to develop the technology, they're just paying someone who has admin access on the files to make a copy, not even necessarily senior empl

I'm no fan of apple, but your barking up the wrong tree. Apple doesn't use AMOLED screens because AMOLED screens don't offer the high resolution that apple wants. Samsung does manufacture the apple 'retina' displays but they are not based on AMOLED technology. No need to call them in as the bad guy here.

A superamoled screen doesn't have the retina's resolution, but it looks much, much better on non-text viewing. Pure contrast and saturation of colors vs. text and higher-res applications. It ends up being a tossup.

Apple doesn't use AMOLED screens because AMOLED screens don't offer the high resolution that apple wants.

It used to be true, but I'm not so sure now. Galaxy Nexus has a 720p AMOLED screen - but that's PenTile. If you count subpixels rather than pixels, though, it's actually exactly the same pixel count as iPhone 4. Granted, physical resolution is still lower - iPhone screen is 3.5", Galaxy Nexus is 4.5". Still, that's about 250 DPI. Given that they are talking about some ongoing developments here, I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung is actually planning to roll out "retina" (300+ DPI) OLED displays soon.

You assume that stolen tech will introduce more competition, which will drive the prices down and increase selection for consumers.I will assume that stolen tech will result in lawsuits, possibly shutdown of the company that was "stealing" and all the resulting costs passed over to the consumer.

Consumers might benefit in the short term, but in the long term as investors refuse to risk their capital in high tech.. nobody will benefit. Also without an accumulation of capital (since nobody will be able to make a large profit margin due to competition), there won't be anyone with the capital to fund new research.

Sadly not, don't forget that all those blown caps in the early 00s was due to corporate espionage, they stole only part of the formula and tried to "fill in the blank" and got it wrong, causing untold losses from prematurely blown boards.

Also what you are advocating is basically a form of "race to the bottom" which as we have seen really only gets you garbage. There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitc

There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitcanned 3 weeks after the warranty is gone, and that is because of quality parts. I make sure i have the best parts, from solid caps to high quality fans, whereas the Dell uses the cheapest shit they can get their hands on.

How do you tell which parts are built to last? Most reviews I see on Newegg, Anandtech, etc. focus on initial quality, performance, and price:performance, not durability.

I built a gaming PC in early 2007 with mid-range parts, like a motherboard with solid caps, and nothing has failed so far (using it now). But beyond that, I'd have no idea how to build a durable computer. What's your secret?

It doesn't take long to find out who makes the quality parts, especially if you eat your own dog food. For example do NOT buy ECS if you are ever wanting to upgrade the CPU, as only what is out at the time will be supported PERIOD. oh they'll update their lists but they won't update their BIOS/UEFI and without the update you'll find the chips won't run correctly. For fans ALWAYS use bearings, never sleeves as the sleeves wear out and get noisy as hell quickly, Also it doesn't hurt to have a couple of gamer

Wow! That's more info than I could ask for. I just checked and my 2007 pc has sleeve bearing fans - no wonder it is so loud now. I'm confused about your assessment of ASRock - you say they OC their motherboards by default? What does that mean, exactly?

Also, do you have a website or anything set up for your pc building business? I may want to refer friends/acquaintances to you if they want a pc built and I'm too busy/lazy to do it for them.

AMOLED displays provide higher refresh rates than their passive-matrix OLED counterparts, improving response time often to under a millisecond, and they consume significantly less power. This advantage makes active-matrix OLEDs well suited for portable electronics, where power consumption is critical to battery life.

I haven't the time to look up every acronym and backronym on the entire internet. I strongly suspect very few people do. As a basic standard any news reporter should clarify at a minimum the more eldritch terms. And this isn't being particularly picky, it is a literal journalistic standard.

Then I would recommend the same thing I do to people in meatspace who blather on about topics they know nothing about: tell them to shut their pie-holes and learn something.

If you were simultaneously representing yourself as a news outlet, I'd say you were therefore a piss poor news outlet.:D Honestly, you have people whining about verbatim copy pasta newsfeeds on here all the time, someone points out the same thing and its bad cos blog.

If you were simultaneously representing yourself as a news outlet, I'd say you were therefore a piss poor news outlet.:D

So.. Fox? Or perhaps MSNBC? I won't bother mentioning CNN, as they're more of a playground than a news organization these days (whose day is it to play with the "Magic Wall?")

Honestly, you have people whining about verbatim copy pasta newsfeeds on here all the time, someone points out the same thing and its bad cos blog.

I bitch, but I have to admit the summaries here are still far more grammatically and factually correct than, say, every article on Yahoo. I hate Yahoo News for their piss-poor reporting and total lack of proofreading... yet I keep going back...

I haven't the time to look up every acronym and backronym on the entire internet. I strongly suspect very few people do. As a basic standard any news reporter should clarify at a minimum the more eldritch terms. And this isn't being particularly picky, it is a literal journalistic standard.

True. However, if you're the/. crowd, you'd know it was something related to display technology already. Hell, the public knows it's something about display technology because the term AMOLED has been plastered all over

It sucks to be called out on being wrong? That's not a rhetorical question, BTW. The only difference between me and you is not necessarily amount of knowledge, but simply the fact I don't feel compelled to act like an asshat everytime I say something that is not quite correct.

a) there is nothing incorrect in anything I said and b) its usually people who are badly wrong, such as yourself, who then start getting all personal when they have noplace else to run.

Hell, the public knows it's something about display technology because the term AMOLED has been plastered all over the place.

Bullshit.

That is all.

I went to a cellphone provider's webiste and looked at their phones. Like this one [rogers.com]. Of which "AMOLED" is plastered on at least 6 phones.

It's a technology, and it's a marketing spec plastered all over the place. I just saw an ad for some Samsung Android phone, and it claimed a Super AMOLED screen. A radio ad for the Galaxy Nexus (heard of that phone? It came with I

Well, one thing is for sure, I'm impressed with the speed at which google [lmgtfy.com] crawls slashdot.

As for the exact function/definition of AMOLED, do you really need it to know the basic gist of the story (employees of Samsung were nabbed trying to sell trade secrets for display technology). If the article were about a new AMOLED screen, it might be more useful, but the story in this case was more about the bust than the actual tech.

AMOLED SECRETS STOLEN! wtf is an amoled, probably some sort of oled, lets look that up and see whats what. Oh right, well I'll just post that on slash with a tut tut for the poor journalism that wasted my time searching for it. Cue bloggers up in arms over disparagement of blogs, cue comments saying it would have been easier to just look it up than to complain about it missing the behaviour modification benefits of complaints in terms of those offering a service, and we are done.

I did, champ. And then I came back and posted it to slashdot for all to admire, thus saving others the ongoing bother of having to search for it themselves, a courtesy I'd expect in advance from any site claiming to present the news to me. And who knows how many future shoddy performances I've prevented merely by complaining, since as everyone is aware, you don't improve things unless you open your mouth.

I haven't the time to look up every acronym and backronym on the entire internet.

According to this quick search [google.com.au] "AMOLED" has been mentioned 4910 times on this site. I'd say this term has moved into the realm of assumed knowledge, and that you've moved into the realm of assumed stupidity.

While I'll agree with you that it's ridiculous to be expected to know every acronym that is currently in use, you aren't being required to look up every single one. The article mentions ONE specific acronym.

I'm assuming that since you are posting to/., you probably have internet access. Even on a slow connection, it should take less time to pull up a new tab, type in "www.google.com," type in "AMOLED," and click search, than to make multiple comments here on/.. Or, if you have Firefox, you can simply high

Really? Your preferred way to get more of the stuff you want made is to encourage theft from the people who are risking giant piles of money to develop it in the first place? What are you, 8 years old?